Rationality & Revelation: C. S. Lewis & Lambeth

It is difficult to know what C. S. Lewis—born 100 years ago this
coming November—would have thought of this summer’s Lambeth Conference,
at which the world’s Anglican bishops will meet to discuss matters of
common concern. He was so eager to uphold “mere Christianity” and
to bring together believing Christians to face the threats and challenges of
the rapidly secularizing societies of the West that he wrote very little about
Anglican affairs.

And yet he did a few times jump into a controversy. He jumped in most famously
in his essay “Priestesses in the Church?”, published in an English
magazine before the Lambeth Conference of 1948. (It is republished in God in
the Dock.) Someone had proposed in the same magazine that the Conference endorse
the ordination of women, and though Lewis admitted that the proposal had little
chance of succeeding, he went out of his way to oppose it, which suggests how
deeply he felt the error.

Rational Innovations

In the essay, he admitted that “all the rationality is on the side of
the innovators.” Women are as capable as men “of piety, zeal, learning
and whatever else seems necessary for the pastoral office.”

The reason for opposing the innovation is that a woman cannot represent God
to us as a priest must do. (There are also compelling biblical arguments against
placing women in headship, which Lewis didn’t mention.)

Think, he continued, of praying to “Our Mother” as well as “Our
Father,” or Jesus being born as a girl, or speaking of the Father, Daughter,
and Holy Spirit. If we did any of these, “we should be embarked on a different
religion,” so that “a child who has been taught to pray to a Mother
in Heaven would have a religious life radically different from that of a Christian
child.”

We know now that Lewis was right about this. In the official feminist liturgies
of the Episcopal Church, the transcendence of God and the depths of our own
sin have disappeared. The result is a very cozy and reassuring religion, but
one without the realism about the human condition that is the condition for
repentance, healing, and renewal, and without the sort of God who can save us.

The Problem

Though “God Himself has taught us how to speak of Him,” the “innovators
are really implying that sex is something superficial, irrelevant to the spiritual
life.” And this is a grave mistake, for “We have no authority to
take the living and semitive figures which God has painted on the canvas of
our nature and shift them about as if they were mere geometrical figures.”

This argument “is what common sense will call ‘mystical’,”
he continued. “Exactly. The Church claims to be the bearer of a revelation.”
And indeed “there ought to be something in it [our religion] opaque to
our reason though not contrary to it. . . . [T]hat is the real
issue. The Church of England can remain a church only if she retains this opaque
element.”

For, though Lewis did not explain this, the restriction of ordination to men
is truly rational, because it expresses the Reason working in creation. But
this Reason we, created and fallen as we are, cannot completely see. We need
God to show us. We need revelation to be reasonable.

Here we can see how accepting women’s ordination slips so easily into
approving homosexuality. If it is irrational to bar from ordination one category
of people because they have the wrong generative organs, it is irrational to
restrict marriage to one category of people because they want to use their organs
in an unusual way. If sex is superficial and irrelevant to the spiritual life,
it is irrelevant to the moral life.

Lewis would, I think, have been disturbed by the degree to which the ordination
of women has been accepted today, not only by those who do in fact accept it,
but by those who oppose it but do not seem (anymore) to believe it worth troubling
about. The Episcopal Church has declared that one must believe in it, or at
least act as if one does (which is of course the same thing), and from the other
Churches of the Anglican Communion we hear, thunderingly: nothing.

The Bishops Should Speak

This surely would have disappointed him, but he would have been pleased to find
the African, Asian, and South American bishops standing so strongly for the
Christian teaching on sex and marriage. (As he wrote in Mere Christianity, “There
is no getting away from it: the old Christian rule is, ‘Either marriage,
with complete faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence’.”)

After all, here too rationality seems to be on the side of the innovators. Two
men or two women can live together as harmoniously and sacrificially as a man
and a woman, and more so than many men and women. Why should they be denied
the expression of their love just because they desire a member of their own
sex?

The answer is that God has told us they cannot, even if it seems to us irrational.
Lewis would have expected the bishops gathered in Canterbury to submit themselves
to the revelation and admit that much of what they assert to an unbelieving
world is opaque. He would have asked of them—expected of them—the
courage to say, “Thus saith the Lord.”

Saying this means, most pointedly, that homosexuality is not something about
which the bishops may “dialogue” or create commissions to “study,”
if those mean (as they always do in Anglican circles) acting as if God has not
spoken clearly. But it also means that they must transmit the revelation so
that it is not so much a message about homosexuality as about the redemption
of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, for the Lord saith thus only for our
good.

—David Mills

Reprinted with permission from Mandate, the bimonthly magazine
of the Prayer Book Society of the Episcopal Church (PO Box 35220, Philadelphia,
PA 19128).

For Lewis’s views on sex and marriage, see especially Mere
Christianity (Book III, chapters 1, 5, 6), The Screwtape Letters
(Letter 18), and The Four Loves (especially chapter 5). For his view
of homosexuality, see his letter published in Sheldon Vanauken’s A
SevereMercy (chapter 6).

David Mills , former editor of Touchstone and executive editor of First Things, is a senior editor of The Stream and columnist for several Catholic publications. His last book is Discovering Mary. He and his family attend St. Joseph's Church in Corapolis, PA.

“Rationality & Revelation: C. S. Lewis & Lambeth” first appeared in the July/August 1998 issue of Touchstone. If you enjoyed this article, you'll find more of the same in every issue.

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